Issue Five

Autumn 2012

Sea View

When her youngest takes everything he can’t pack to Oxfam and heads at first light for Inverness, she weepsinto the wrinkled shine of late summer sand,listens to shingle hiss the receding tide,and buries her heart in a cheek shaped hollowcold in the Sussex flint.

When her kindest lover yet hears enoughhe shoves his full plate like a snooker shot:Christmas crockery smashed in her lapand the rest of what may’ve sustained them splatters her flat.

Caught on the icy back stair tight lipped in slippers, she bites her tongueclean off, sees it sizzle down to the shorewhere it steams itself in the shallows.

When her last friends drift, they wave.She turns away, slips into scuffed kitten heelsto sling back gins at a windswept bar

till all she’s left is a rust-licked wall to climb.Sea swallows stars and iron steps bleed,serve her again up to another night’s blur.She stands by the breadth of her bedstares out the thickening pane, on the swelldark, still fresh.